The Evening Hour by A. Carter Sickels Page A

instead of rebuilding. Up behind the church was a little family cemetery on a half acre that the coal company wanted but would never get. Cole thought about the little cemeteries all over the mountains and hollows, protected by law from the coal companies. Maybe in the end it would be the dead that saved the land.
    The church was once a sturdy, box-shaped building without stained glass or a fancy altar, nothing like the churches on TV, or the ones his aunts now went to. This was just a bare room with aisles big enough for the ladies to fall down into fits of passion. Until he was seventeen, Cole went to church every Sunday, and usually Monday and Wednesday nights as well. His grandfather had preached his last service two years ago. Cole was not there, but his grandmother told him that his granddaddy had grabbed the sides of the pulpit as if he was afraid of falling, and, confused, had asked, “Who are you?”
    Cole pushed a pile of branches out of the way and walked through the vine-strangled doorway. The roof was partly caved in, the walls warped and stained yellow, the windows shattered. The church had been stripped of its pictures of the Last Supper and of Jesus on the cross. Even the mismatched folding chairs, which they had used instead of pews, were gone. Squirrels scurried along the rafters. He walked to the front, his boots crunching shards of glass and twigs. The pulpit was still in its place. Cole stood behind it and faced an invisible congregation.
    When his grandfather preached, he often went on for hours. He talked more fire and brimstone than most Holiness preachers, and his strict, dour ways, combined with his quick temper, also set him apart from the more joyous types. Cole had once overheard a churchgoer describe his grandfather as Holiness with a strong dose of Baptist. He was the old-timey gaspy kind of preacher, sucking in and spouting out air, ending practically every line with an inflection. “It’s a glorious day-ah for those who have felt the Holy Ghost-ah, I’m saying the Holy Ghost-ah.” On special occasions, snakes were kept next to the pulpit. Sometimes they were quiet; sometimes they rattled their cages. The scripture they followed was a simple verse: They shall take up serpents . Bites were rare, but his grandfather’s wrist had been grazed, and Uncle Larry had lost a couple of fingertips. The rattlers would kill.
    His grandfather never touched a snake unless he was anointed, which meant that God was moving through him. Then he could do anything. He would reach into the hissing, slithering pile as if in a trance and hold a snake above his head and shout. At first, the congregation would hush, a quivering silence falling over them, and then a collective rush of sound would follow—gasps, praises to God. Some would go forward and pass the serpents hand to hand. Cole had seen them draped around a person’s neck like jewelry. People shouted, wept, danced. Once he watched an old man drink strychnine and never blink.
    â€œYour mama used to handle serpents,” his grandfather told him. “Before she turned into a harlot.”
    What Cole knew of his mother was a mix of his grandmother’s soft words and his grandfather’s judgments. A few stories from his aunts, a single faded photograph. Mostly he learned about her from the family silence, the quiet that was wrapped around her name. His grandfather said she was a whore who turned her back on God, but there was another time, a time when he had adored her. Ruby had started preaching at eleven years old. She went to baptisms and revivals, and at school, she proselytized. Unlike her own child, Ruby had no trouble speaking, and people loved to hear her, her little-girl voice puncturing something deep and frozen within them.
    One time, when he was a little kid, Cole had looked up at the pulpit to see his grandfather glaring down on him, a copperhead in his hands, and before he could stop it, a prayer rushed